Hello friends from deep within my postdoctoral cocoon, where I am attempting to spin myself into the glorious creature known as a tenure-track professor. The universe yields to inquiry, which is little remarked upon even though Aquinas considered it a proof of a supreme intelligibility, perhaps because inquiry, these days, takes vast quantities of data and a lot of covariance matrices, and rarely seems all that glamorous, or even intelligible, when you are engaged in it. Still, it is satisfying in a way that painting the world with the broad brush of general principles is not. The weather is cold here, although not as cold as it is accustomed to be, and I leave tomorrow for the muddy skies and gentle rains of Portland.

It is painful to be away from you, to wait for our next meeting, but there is something good in that, too, when I understand the spheres of my action and what I must suffer, and invest each with as much of my self as I can bring to bear. Until then, fare forward.

(cdm | HappyAdvent )